One morning, Dorrigo woke to find that Darky had lit a fire in the middle of a street and sitting in a chair. Nearby, a man named Rabbit Hendricks is drawing an illustration to replace the photo of another man’s wife. Then he begins a sketch of the group having coffee together, as other men begin to join them. They hear a 75-pound shell incoming and scatter. A man named Yabby Burrows dies instantly, and so does an Arab boy nearby, who was watching them.

After six months working in Java, the officers truck the prisoners to Siam for a new project. Then the Japanese take the men to a railway station and ship them in small railway cars without even enough room for the POWs to sit down. In the five days of the trip, three men die. They arrive at the Line and begin clearing the teak forest. Three days later, they are told to make their own camp at a location many miles away. An old Japanese guard named Kenji Mogami shows them how to make huts.